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1) They are "available to the masses" .... they just won't be marketed. Microsoft did learn a bit -- they're only going to *market* a couple of versions depending on the target audience. Nothing stops anyone from purchasing Enterprise.... and it isn't quite clear which is the crippleware "Starter" or "Basic Home" (spokespeople contradicting each other). Now why they're going to take on the headache of HAVING that many versions to manage beats me. :P
2) Maybe we look at different news sites .... I don't see the 'alarmist shock' reports, even in Slashdot (which really isn't a 'news site' so much as a pointer site with commentary).
3) Yeah, I was hoping for a gritty improvement to UAC.... but not happening it seems.

If they'd sell me a Windows 7 that didn't have IE, WMP, Express, DRM, and other such application-layer apps infesting the innards, I'd be waving its flag as an excellent solution for many people. But I'm not really seeing that .... I can only hope someone slaps whoever thought up "hey, lets limit the # of apps they can run..... um, which things are apps?" before they release it.

Starter and Basic Home edition are intented third world countries though, the computers sold in the U.S. will have Home Premium and Pro installed. What I don't understand is why U.S. citizens are so worked up about those two editions.

And why would a normal person buy a single Volume license? It's not like VL are sold in stores like Best Buy and Fry's.

I don't see what the big deal with IE preinstalled is either, you aren't forced to use it for anything except Windows Updates.

Most people will find Windows 7 via the purchase of a new machine. There's no particular reason to update an older machine unless:
1) there's a specific application that requires it (and your h/w is good enough).
2) you assemble your own PCs like I do and don't mind tearing things apart and upgrading pieces periodically.

I agree. M$ should realize that the time when people used to change their OS every 3 years or so is already history. The rapid growth of the Internet makes it more comfortable for the majority of people to have a single OS with continuous updates (including 3rd party one) and use it for many years. Vista does have its flaws to cause its failure, but they can't deny that some people simply have no incentive to drop their XP systems when they are still working well.

There was no "real" reason to change your OS every 3 years ANYWAY. As there's no "real" reason to move up to the new security program each year, as long as you continue to get the updates, as there is no reason to update any of your software, as there's no "real" reason to upgrade ANYTHING on the PC as long as it works.

Based on your logic, my DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 worked great at the time... Damn I should have stayed with my 486 and all those nice programs that were working just fine. I mean... Progress? Evolution? WTH is that and who needs it? O_o

On the topic at hand, I'm an early Vista adopter, and I'll possibly be an early Win7 adopter, too. I like Vista better than XP, but yeah, Windows 7 feel better than Vista. My Vista drivers and programs all work with Windows 7 and the only real issue I had was an ethernet one which I managed to solve. The only thing I didn't like in Vista was the price, and I believe I might not like 7's price either, but other than that, besides the early crappy drivers and "Vista compatible" lies from various software companies, Vista itself didn't trouble me. It's actually the first time I didn't need to format my PC for almost 2 years (one format being 3 months after first install cause I was stupid enough to believe the "Vista compatible" crap and install junk like Nero and stuff.

So anyway, provided 7 won't be ridiculously priced again, I'd switch on the first chance I get. I already use the Beta 1 like it's my main, with Vista just sitting on the main disk just in case something goes wrong, but it doesn't even feel like Beta, it actually behaves ridiculously well. There are some minor bugs here and there ( like emptying the Media Player library and not being able to get it built up again, even if WMP 12 is supposedly checking, so I'm trying to rebuild the whole index now), but overall, if MS was selling the thing as it is, I'd still buy it.

Got win7 installed, after some troubles with the installer, missing install.wim. I don't know if i'll get the final, unless software support for XP suddenly drops, i don't see a reason to move. I mean i would've stayed with 2K, but a lot of software over time required that you to have WinXp/SP2 running to get it installed. I'll wait until i'm being force to adopt it, or i'll just throw an alternative OS onto my hdd.

Vexx if they dont have IE arent you going to find it annoying to browse on the net to get that alternative browser you like? if not other things as well...

(also IE8 is so much better in rendering, its almost like they arent using Trident anymore and switched to Presto/WebKit )

I simply object to it being "integrated" (infested) within the operating system. It doesn't belong there. Any browser doesn't belong there. Nothing stops them from having an application level IE that the user can choose not to install or install at a later time. I happen to keep Opera and Firefox on media (flashdrive, DVD/CD) for just such occasions.

Yes, IE8, as a browser, is much much nicer. Take it out of the OS ring, put it back at the application layer, and I'll think about it (especially if they get better at handling zero-day exploits unlike last month :P)

I simply object to it being "integrated" (infested) within the operating system. It doesn't belong there. Any browser doesn't belong there. Nothing stops them from having an application level IE that the user can choose not to install or install at a later time. I happen to keep Opera and Firefox on media (flashdrive, DVD/CD) for just such occasions.

Yes, IE8, as a browser, is much much nicer. Take it out of the OS ring, put it back at the application layer, and I'll think about it (especially if they get better at handling zero-day exploits unlike last month :P)

Well, there are some other Windows features which rely on the existence of IE(8), such as Gadget.

So what if they rely on them? This could be simply solved through a dependency system; "If you want to install x please install y first".

So, the average joe will just browse through, click yes, and continue. Most other people who want to see the new features will also click yes and continue. So that leaves a minority that for some reason doesn't want IE integrated into Windows features. I wouldn't waste work hours trying to come up with an IE-less setup unless someone actually forced the company to, and even then, the average joe wouldn't know what to do without a browser. Also, this will fall again into the minority that just doesn't want to have IE inside, cause when offered with the option to install a browser (IE) or not, the average joe will just click yes again. A waste of employee time and a total waste of money if you ask me. Windows is a mainstream OS, not a tweaker's paradise, it's supposed to be as generic and simple as possible, for starters. Then, if there are tweaks you can do, they should not affect installing or uninstalling Windows features to pull them off.

Which brings me to my final point. Even if some organization forces Microsoft to cut IE out (like EU did with WMP), people will just buy it WITH the IE anyway, that's what happened with the infamous Windows N editions, no one wanted them. Those who just can't stand IE and WMP can just stay with Linux. But then, it's these people that end up hurting an OS's sales by spreading FUD all over the place (UAC IS a good idea, yeah it's a pain but so is Linux always asking for my friggin pass to install stuff from a source as untrusted as Synaptics... DRM, where the hell was it, I play whatever I want, I rip whatever I want, I do whatever I want since day 1, so where the hell did they hide it?... It wasn't... dwm.exe... right? /sarcasm. Slow, yeah it's slower than XP on the same system, get a newer PC, disable stuff, or just stay with DOS, I loved DOS back in its glorious days, clean to a fault, and stable as a rock). My experience shows that no one likes Vista (whether he actually used it for more than a day or not at all) until he actually tries Vista on a contemporary PC. I seriously doubt most people even care whether IE and WMP come installed with Windows and in the end, nor should they be. Microsoft doesn't prohibit them from installing other stuff inside. I'm mostly using Songbird for music and Firefox for browsing. I used to use MPC for all other media, but WMP 12 is good enough to give it a try and play most stuff on it (and test the thing anyway, it IS a beta version after all and I'm running it on a beta OS).

What is MS apparently doing with 7?

1. Make it lighter than Vista.
2. Make it faster than Vista.
Now hopefully they'll also 3. make it cheaper than Vista, so they'll give the ancients enough incentives to upgrade from a 6yr old system. Hopefully this will shield it from all the new FUD that's bound to arise.

On a side note, I had to use my Ubuntu disk to test Win7 and I kinda miss messing around linux distros. Hopefully MS will released 7 soon, so I can free up the Vista disk and install Kubuntu (want to try KDE 4.2 a bit).

I'll just say I install and use all sorts of operating systems in my line of work. I also know something about operating system design. Putting the browser and other applications into the operating system was a marketing decision in an attempt to lock users in - it wasn't made for a technical reason. It has actually introduced technical problems that wouldn't have occurred if the operating system were shielded from application behavior. The EU understands that and is correctly taking such anti-competitive behavior to task. Interlinking application features like Gadget to IE is yet another 'lock in' technique. Gadget is fun... but did it really need to be dependent on IE when a library call was all that was needed?

The problem is that Microsoft's main revenue stream is still Fortune 500 and all the corporations under that. Some of the things they have done to capture consumer marketshare over the last eight years has really ended up pissing off the business community. With XP and on, its probably more accurate to characterize "Windows" as an appliance package since it is now just about impossible to strip off the fluff for business applications. From a business perspective, you do not want many of these things on a point-of-sale system or a medical records system or even an office computer, etc. Past versions of Windows were more amenable to such specific use. Business users are not happy that even the most basic workstations and end-use platforms - millions of them - may require hardware upgrades to support applications integrated into the platform they don't want. This is not a "minority of people".

I guess I'm a little annoyed that any critique or discussion of impact is being characterized as FUD. The "consumer" experience is not the only experience nor is it the primary revenue stream for Microsoft. It may be that Microsoft is slowly giving up in the business sector but in some ways they're making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Windows 7 will make a fine home-user or perhaps small-business user package it looks like, I'll definitely have at least a couple of them in the house and probably any new laptops that show up .... otoh, Microsoft's existence in the business sphere is becoming quite problematic.

Nah, true, I'm talking about home user experience, businesses can't just upgrade everything every 3 years without tangible benefits, that would be ridiculous and a waste of capital, not to mention either having to check application compatibility or upgrade the application itself, but upgrading the applications is unproductive, and at worse, you'd have to re-train your employees, another waste of hours. While small businesses just MIGHT be able to pull that, there's the hardware issue, too, and unless businesses can increase production and profit from the whole soft+hard upgrade, there's no point doing that, unless the system is practically falling apart. Plus, there's really no point for all the whistles and Aero things in a business environment, true (although I bet the employees themselves might disagree). It IS a waste using resources of a system that could otherwise deliver in a business setting in order to have worthless transparent windows flying around. I wouldn't want to have to buy new equipment and watch my employees play with the eye candy.

However, in defense to Microsoft, MS is a business, too, not a charitable institution, it can't support Win 98, 2000, or whatever Windows corporations seem stuck to indefinitely, unless the corporations in question are willing to have license subscription and support subscription. Otherwise its using its own resources without profit, which is retarded for a corporation and it has to stop at some point.

However, as far as the home user population is concerned, I still stand by my opinion that it's still mostly FUD, besides the over-inflated price.

Aye, as far as the *home* experience goes.... I liked XP (or at least XP Pro) ... with Vista I've had a considerable number of system fails on various machines (usually a corrupted registry or a mangled boot sector) --- they were easily repairable by using the system disk and "repair system" and having a cup of coffee, but the question started arising as to how stable the registry handlers were. The problem seems to have diminished though I can't point to a specific update/patch that was labeled "turn registry hosing code off".
I suspect Windows 7 .... if they keep the same code branching which it looks like they are is going to a glorified "Vista SP4" with a new desktop and widgets. That isn't a complaint or a 'dis' --- it took them 4 service packs to get win2K to be as stable as it ended up being so I consider that a good thing.

I believe there is actually a library call alternative and some programs use it. The result is/was a nice and constant hit ration when you do a virus scan; since obviously its one of the last things that would get updated. Other then marketing I really do not see a big issue with having IE there, since its a browser it has a much faster version cycle, and if it wasn't the most used the attackers would move to the next candidate, so thats a deaf issue. I'm sure if firefox was number one with average easy to fool consumers people would eventually be bashing it as insecure and unsafe, or throw some heavy critic on the way some of the things in it are made.1

Like npal even though I don't have any love for IE I would still chose "yes" when presented with the choice to install it (why should I choose "no"?). This sounds too much to me like a fanboy rant on "why does windows come with networking support" (what next, "windows needs to come with OpenDNS").

Lets remember we're talking about Windows, not a Linux distro.
__________________1Firefox with its "I am lego!" (not to mention varios incarnations) and Opera with its "I am everything!" concepts are way out there as the worst alternatives for a general consumer browsers. Chrome and Safri (with its clones) are the only ones that come close among the 20 or so popular alternative browsers.

I'll just refer you to the SANS professional network administration website, their training and education offerings, perhaps their storm center or security news and leave it at that. The "its popular" defense fails even cursory analysis, even Microsoft doesn't use that anymore. Microsoft itself last month had to advise the world to use a different browser because of a zero-day exploit they couldn't resolve. They have an extremely organic, poorly code-isolated "mature" (spaghetti) product that they have trouble managing themselves. The Microsoft engineers tear their hair out trying to make sure any changes they make won't screw up half a dozen other things due to undocumented tendrils. I've worked on systems like that -- its Hard Work.

I think Windows 7 will provide a pretty desktop and UI, it'll be more stable than Vista, most home users will be fine with it though they'll probably have to upgrade their machines again. I'll use it for gaming and it'll probably be on some of the laptops I keep watch over. Business (and governments that are pro-active on anti-trust) will continue to be unamused by Microsoft and seek ways to reduce their ROI by disentangling themselves from a vendor that behaves as if their main revenue stream didn't exist

Well, as far as the BETA is concerned anyway, it seems lighter than Vista, it seems to be using slightly less memory, and the memory buildup seems a bit slower. It definitely feels faster and it's prettier. Those who have upgraded their PCs for Vista don't need to upgrade again, unless they somehow make it heavy and slow before release. Those who haven't, well I'm not sure, I can't judge. I HAVE a 4yr old laptop that isn't running XP that well, so it'd be interesting to try running 7 beta on it, problem is I don't have the diskspace to do that, the laptop is already dualbooting XP and Xubuntu.

I understand they're doing a better job of memory allocation/deallocation and swapping according to some reports; the kinds of fixes I would hope to see. So if you run Win7 stripped for gaming -- its going to be pretty unobtrusive. If you load it up with all the pretty things, gadgets, fluff, and don't forget anime-endowed rainmeter then it might need more RAM elbow room than before. Since its a beta - too early to judge but it'll more likely be the XP and win2k folks that need to bump up.

In my case, my game machine (vista 64bit) is maxed out at 2GB RAM so I'm looking at replacing the mobo so I can bump up to 4GB. I can probably put off the video card for now. I'm playing with Win7 beta on a little Shuttle box that nearly had a heart attack but I just wanted to see what how the UI treated me and how functional the administrative/maintenance/diagnostic tools looked.

I agree with not integrating aplications into an OS that don't need to be. WMP also pissed me off because of that. I never used wmp or internet explorer but they were stuck there regardless and I couldn't fully remove them. My last days of using xp were me trying to remove wmp9 and ie6. Regardless of whether it be for home use or business imposing your will on the user on what programs they have on their system for no good reason is not only poor design but just plain rude.